"Mother" has always been a generic term synonymous with love, devotion, and sacrifice. There's always been something mystical and ...reverent about them. They're the Walter Cronkites of the human race . . . infallible, virtuous, without flaws and conceived without original sin, with no room for ambivalence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but ...women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act wit...h which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the... games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values--or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be--to be through her son, to live through her son.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularity... accompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Face your own ambivalence about letting go and you will be better able to help you children cope with their own feelings. The insi...ght you gain through your own acceptance of change will bolster your confidence and make you a stronger college parent. The confidence you develop will be evident to your child, who will be able to move away from you without fear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for ple...asure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The myths about what we're supposed to feel as new mothers run strong and deep. . . . While joy and elation are surely present aft...er a new baby has entered our lives, it is also within the realm of possibility that other feelings might crop up: neediness, fear, ambivalence, anger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Some of us were ambivalent, but we don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right.... Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »